Concordia res Parvae Crescunt
by Rob Natelson
Effectively defending American federalism requires us to remember that federalism was not created by the states – nor was it created for state benefit.
Federalism was fashioned by the American people – for the benefit of individuals and of the people as a whole. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, possibly the most eminent defender of the Tenth Amendment to sit on the modern Supreme Court, put it this way:
The Constitution does not protect the sovereignty of States for the benefit of the States or state governments as abstract political entities, or even for the benefit of the public officials governing the States. To the contrary, the Constitution divides authority between federal and state governments for the protection of individuals. State sovereignty is not just an end in itself: “Rather, federalism secures to citizens the liberties that derive from the diffusion of sovereign power.â€
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In private life, Rob Natelson is a long-time conservative/free market activist, but professionally he is a constitutional scholar whose meticulous studies of the Constitution's original meaning have been published or cited by many top law journals. (See: www.constitution.i2i.org/about/.) Most recently, he co-authored The Origins of the Necessary and Proper Clause (Cambridge University Press) and The Original Constitution (Tenth Amendment Center). After a quarter of a century as Professor of Law at the University of Montana, he recently retired to work full time at Colorado's Independence Institute.
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"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
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